


you wanna know how it feels (if only i could)

by dreamsleep



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Elementary!AU, Gen, Mentions of alcoholism, a mess of canons all around, also blood and gore, also if you have not not watched season 1 of elementary and are planning on it spoilers within, brief mention of dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 05:36:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1334017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsleep/pseuds/dreamsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He leaves the rehabilitation center with the keys and the deed and settles down in Brooklyn, trying to figure out how to rebuild his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you wanna know how it feels (if only i could)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a gift for a friend but why not share? I claim no actual knowledge of any character within this fic. 
> 
> Unbeta'd. Any mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title is take from "Running Up that Hill" by Kate Bush/Placebo.

**o.**

A year after Enjolras dies, he goes back to the bar and drinks his way through at least half the liquor supply before someone thinks to stop him.

The words he uses to tell them to piss off don’t nearly have the same effect as his fist in the other man’s jaw.

He’s still drunk and covered in blood when he wakes up in jail the next morning, and Combeferre’s face on the other side of the glass does little to reassure him. The news Combeferre brings has no good tidings either.

His father sends him to rehab and he laughs all the way there. A year is how long it takes before someone notices that the hole in his heart has become a black hole and he laughs because he knows he cannot be fixed, he is a dead man walking. There is nothing to fix.

Enjolras is dead, and the taste of alcohol and the feeling of a man’s fist on his skin is the only way he can feel anything at all even as he drowns.

 

 

**i.**

Rehab is in New York of all places, and he hates it in the way that a Parisian born, British educated individual like himself hates Americans. (His father’s ingenious way of getting him out of the way, he imagines.) He stays silent through the group sessions, and the others learn not to provoke him, because while his fists can find all the tender places on the body, his words can cut down to the soul.

He stays sober to make a point to his father, and the only way they can mark his progress in rehab is by the number of drawings he produces with startling clarity and precision.

September ends and he gets a set of keys and the deed to a house in Brooklyn, on the condition that he remain sober to remain there. He longs for the streets of Paris again, for his friends, but there are still memories there that want to make him reach for a bottle and if that’s the point his father wants to make, then fine.

He leaves the rehabilitation center with the keys and the deed and settles down in Brooklyn, trying to figure out how to rebuild his life.

His doorbell rings three months later, and on the other side of it stands a short woman, with the brightest brown eyes he’s ever seen and waves like molasses that cascade around her face.

She could almost be beautiful, except he hasn’t thought about anyone like that since Enjolras and for that, he hates her.

“Your father has hired me to be your sober companion.”

_Well_ , he thinks to himself. _Well_.

 

 

**ii.**

He has no intention of keeping her, especially if she insists on sticking to her rules. (He hates rules. It’s one of the reasons why he took to art so readily.) Where he goes, she goes and he hates that, feels the layers of the world peeling back until he feels nothing but exposed.

He can’t punch her so he lashes out in other ways instead.

“Says something doesn’t it?” he asks her one night as she’s about to go to sleep. “When you have two alarm clocks to wake up in the morning.”

“It might suggest that I have trouble hearing the first one.” She comments, hanging up her coat before ascending the stairs.

“Or,” he drawls, staring up at her ass. “It might suggest that whoever owns them hates their job.” He pauses. “You could quit, you know. You’d still be paid, I wouldn’t tell my father. But I don’t need a babysitter. Your services were never required.”

She turns slowly, descending down a few steps until she is barely above him in height, and she stares at him at eyes that are no longer warm but something else.

“And what does it say,” she asks quietly, voice firm. “About a man who can’t even look at himself in the mirror? Is he’s so ashamed of what he sees there that he can’t even face the truth about himself? I think he’s given up. And I pity him, because that’s the sort of man who is a danger to himself and to others.”

He can’t say anything to her at that, finds that his jaw is opening and closing as he tries to formulate a reply. By the time he does, the door to her room has closed with a soft thunk before he can even think about moving. His fist clenches and unclenches, but he can’t find anything to hit that would satisfy him, so he locks himself in his studio instead and throws paint at a canvas all night.

He burns it in the garden the next morning. He knows that she sees him do it, but she says nothing.

 

 

**iii.**

He isn’t sure where his sense of justice comes from, but he does know where his fascination with crimes scenes started. He’s an artist, first and foremost from the day that he discovered what a free world it was, to create something beautiful. And by extension, crimes are beautiful. They are beautiful in execution, up until the moment they fail. Consulting on detective cases has become something of a hobby (one that garners a fee to help pay the bills when his art won’t). It takes an artist to appreciate how they are carried out, to understand why and how and he’s good at that.

The body is fresh when he walks through the door, escorted by an officer and he doesn’t miss the fact that her body tenses, even as she turns around to avoid the sight of his brains all over the floor.

“Weren’t you a doctor?” he asks her, eyes greedily drinking in the crime scene.

“Former doctor,” she corrects. “And dead bodies are always different than living ones.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” he muses, storing away that particular tidbit of information for later.

 

 

**iv.**

He manages to get himself arrested after being too aggressive with one suspect(or you know, just smashing up the suspect’s car) and unlike Paris, he has no friends here. So it’s a small surprise to see her on the other side of the glass, bailing him out.

He waits a beat before picking up the phone, hers already in her hand.

“He won’t press charges,” she says finally after a brief pause. “Just a restraining order.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that he’s guilty,” he mutters in French with a huff. She smiles, a quick quirk of her lips before she’s back to professional mode. Curious, he thinks.

“So why are you here?” he asks her, in English this time.

“I told you. Where you go, I go, logistics aside.” He stares at her.

“You must really believe in your job,” he thinks aloud, more than himself than to her.

“I believe in the people that I work with,” she corrects. “No matter how much they may think otherwise.”

 

 

**v.**

She makes him go to meetings.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she says. “But it helps sometimes, to listen to what other people have been through.”

He wants to tell her that other people didn’t cause the person that they love to be murdered before spiralling into an alcohol fueled, boxing binge. But despite her attempts to understand how he came to be this way, her attempts to get him to talk about his past, he won’t. That’s his pain and no one else’s.

So he goes to the meetings because she makes him, makes him listen and he resents her for it, even as he acknowledges that she’s starting to get under his skin. She’s learning about him without needing to hear him say a thing and that’s alarming, except she’s about as full of secrets as he is and he’s learning too, even though she’s told him (several times) how she isn’t here to anything else but his sober companion.

(He’s made it clear he’s ruled out friendship with her anyways, and that doesn’t leave her with much.)

He’s a cynical asshole and she’s not (or maybe she is, she’s just better at hiding it) and she can still connect to people.

“It’s not that you can’t connect to people,” she says when they’re leaving one day. “It’s that you don’t want to.”

“Same thing,” he tells her, and he pretends that he doesn’t see the look in her eye as he turns away.

 

 

**vi.**

Sometimes she’ll wake up in the morning in time to see his sexual partners leaving the house. Sometimes they’re women. Sometimes they’re men. Sometimes multiples, sometimes a healthy mix. He isn’t sure if he escorts them out around the time she wakes up and comes downstairs for coffee to provoke her. Then again, he probably does.

“Sex keeps my mind active. Better alternative than drugs, alcohol or violence, no?” he asks her the first time she walks in on it and blinks.

“It’s your life,” she tells him as she pours herself a cup of coffee after a particularly long pause. “As long as all parties are consenting, I have no issue with that.”

The lack of disappointment he feels at her pronouncement is brief before he joins her at the breakfast table.

 

 

**vii.**

Other times she’ll wake up in her room and see that he’s managed to pull an armchair into her room and sit by the window (ostensibly for light reasons). The first time it’s jarring, because she was sure she locked the door and everything.

“Oh good, you’re finally up,” he’ll say, looking up from his sketchpad. “What do you think of these?” And he’ll flip the book open to a few sketches back, which will eerily show details of the crime scene they just saw the other day.

Sometimes she’s tempted to flop over and go back to sleep but that’s not what she’s here for. She’ll take the sketches as he putters around her room, putting out clothes for her (she’s running late after he gets rid of her alarm clocks) and throwing theories at her.

Most of their days start like this.

 

 

**viii.**

He tries to find out something, anything on her and fails. In a world full of information, pointless and otherwise, she is an anomaly, and a mystery he’s beginning to want to solve.

Maybe he’s underestimated her though.

She gives him three hours to himself (and to be honest, now that she’s been living in his house for weeks, sharing his food and been almost everywhere with him, it’s strange to not have her there) and returns with a loaded question.

“Who was Enjolras?” she asks him, and deposits the bundle of letters he had entrusted to the rehabilitation center’s gardener (his only friend there) on the table.

_Well_ , he thinks to himself. _Well_.

 

 

**before.**

Once upon a time in Paris, there was an American ex-pat who stumbled into a murder investigation. His name was Enjolras, and he had kept in touch long after the investigation ended. Enjolras was studying politics in Paris, on his way to a doctorate. Just a lowly student, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when an assassin had almost taken out a leading professor at the university, known for his radical political views.

Almost, because Grantaire had stopped it from happening, saved them all, led the investigation into who might be behind this.

“To me,” he says, feeling her presence behind him. “He was perfect. All light. No darkness. He taught me to hope in a way that I haven’t ever felt in a long time. He believed in change. And I.” He swallows, turning to see her there, shrouded in shadow and light. “I believed in him.”

“And he died for it.”

“Is that why you do this to yourself?” she asks quietly, at long last.

His smile is dry, cracked somewhere down the middle and broken. Even if she can’t see it, he has a feeling she knows anyways. “Isn’t that what penance is?” he asks her.

She doesn’t say anything and he never expected her to. Her face says enough, that she understands, perhaps far better than anyone else can.

 

 

**ix.**

He never asks her to stay, even as the days they have together tick down. Aversion to dead bodies aside, she’s not awful. She’s a great sober companion, if not the best. She keeps him on the straights, aware of his triggers almost as well as he is. (Her aversion to his hobby, as she calls it, stems from the fact she’s afraid that anything will trigger him back into his former habits, a fear he’s grown to discard with the time she spends with him. He stops caller her his babysitter, his helper monkey.)

She finds him a sponsor two months before she is due to leave (a fact that she’s been bringing up less and less, almost as if she doesn’t want to) and he almost violently rejects the idea, except she herself has never been an addict. Just unlucky, he supposes.

“I won’t be with you forever,” she tells him gently one night. “But when I leave, and you might be dreading that day, or celebrating it. Whichever it is, you’re going to be ready to go out on your own. I’m sure of it.”

Just as well, all things considered. No one ever really stays; everyone leaves.

 

 

**x.**

But of course things can never be that simple.

Because Enjolras turns up alive in the middle of another investigation two days before her tenure as his sober companion ends and everything is about to blow up because suddenly, after months of working with him, to make sure that he wouldn’t relapse without something drastic happening (in which case, she’s made it clear that he should call her), something drastic happens.

He is fragile again, and her request for an extension is denied by his father and she has no idea what she’s going to do.

 

 

**xi.**

“I can’t leave him,” he tells her in a room in the police precinct. On the other side of the glass is Enjolras, shaking and barely holding it together. She wishes she could believe that this is happening, but there’s a part of her that thinks this is too convenient, a fact she’s tried to make clear to Grantaire but doesn’t seem to be sticking. “I’ve ruined his life enough. It only seems right that I should fix it.”

“I can’t leave you,” she points out, almost like the day the met. She’s still his sober companion. She’s still--

Except, this is her last day as his sober companion. Come midnight, they will part ways like agreed, like they agreed months ago except they aren’t the people they were months ago. She’s seen him change and she’s been all the more glad for it. And now….

“Our agreement via my father ends tonight,” he reminds her gently. “A deal is a deal.”

She wants to say something, anything, but can’t, because there are no words coming to her.

She’s going to miss this. All the early mornings when he would just burst into her room, eyes averted, to wake her up for a case or when he needed to go somewhere. Late nights in his living room, watching something stupid like hockey (he’s French, the fuck is up with his fascination with hockey?), the way he swears under his breath when she points out something medical (another part of her past she can’t quite bury). She’ll miss the random doodles he leaves on the fridge when they’re out of food (he can’t just write it down) and the way he’ll complain about take out food.

She’s going to miss him, no matter how professional she’s tried to be for the both of them because this was never about making friends. It was helping him get past rehab and to readjust to the real world.

“I wish,” he starts to say, but then he thinks better of it, and she thanks him for it. If he had said what she (wishes) suspects he would have said, it would have made everything worse. “Thank you,” he says instead, and it hurts.

He leans down to kiss her just this once, a brush of lips against her cheek that isn’t what they need but what he thinks they deserve and she’s never been able to fight him on that. It feels like goodbye and she’s still standing there in the observation room as he leaves, enters the other room to take Enjolras home (and that won’t be her home for much longer either) and she hates everything.

 

 

**xii.**

She gets back to the brownstone first, packs what little she brought with her there and returns to her apartment in Queens. She tries to tell herself that it’s not a big deal. She did her job, and her last payment will come in on Thursday but something doesn’t feel quite right.

She wishes with all of her might that she was wrong when she gets a text early in the morning and she’s running back to the brownstone to find Grantaire with a bullet wound in his shoulder and betrayal in his face and fucking shit her first thought is relapsing and the world turns itself upside down again.

 

 

**in the middle.**

She’d only spoken to Enjolras once before, when he has lain in the hospital, recovering from captivity wounds and Grantaire had been elsewhere, most likely trying to ascertain how long and what he would need to do to help him get back to….wherever he was.

“You’re R’s friend, aren’t you?” he asks her, weary and tired but still smiling.

“Yes,” she says, because Grantaire has always been in charge of telling other people exactly what their relationship is. (Patient confidentiality and all that.) “I’m glad to see you’re awake. That’s a good sign.”

He laughs. “From having my head messed around with, you mean?”

She doesn’t say anything, isn’t sure there is anything to say, except “He’s just gone to answer some questions down at the precinct. He’ll be back soon.”

“Thank you,” Enjolras says, slipping slowly into drowsy sleep. “For taking care of him.”

She really has nothing to say to that. He’s asleep and she’s still not sure what else to say, except she stays until Grantaire runs back into the room, breathless. He doesn’t see her, not for a moment as he takes a seat by Enjolras’s bedside and takes his hand.

She leaves without saying a word.

 

 

**xiii.**

Grantaire had it wrong, it turns out. Enjolras was never all light. Light too generates shadows, and Enjolras had plenty of them. Justice in his gaze, in his bearing, but also the lack of mercy in them, his belief in the absolute truth, nothing else. It’s easy now to see where the pieces fell into place, where he takes justice into his own hands and organized a group loyal to him to do the same and the unspeakable to achieve the ends.

Who knows how far his network stretches? How many have died on his order, all for a better world?

Enjolras believed in change; Grantaire isn't sure if he ever knew what kind of change he meant, back then or now.

 

 

**xiv.**

She stays with Grantaire even though she has another client waiting for her. Her tenure as his sober companion is over, but she knows how close he is to relapsing. It isn’t about the money anymore. It’s about taking care of him and making sure he doesn’t slip.

It’s always easier the second time, isn’t it?

 

 

**interlude.**

She’s running errands early in the morning (like making sure they have food because Grantaire forgot) when she gets a call from her father, saying something about her mother taking a fall and needing someone at the hospital. It’s not a question for her: she stops her errands, jumps on the nearest train and comes out near the hospital when an unmarked car pulls up next to her. Instinct has her reaching into her pocket for her phone to call someone, anyone, when the window rolls down and she knows that face well, though it’s no longer as tired or pale as it was when it lay in a hospital bed. “There’s no need for that. Your mother is perfectly safe. I just needed an excuse to get you away from our mutual friend so we could have a chat.”

Enjolras is all smiles when she sits across from him at lunch at the Plaza, but for the life of her, she cannot find it within herself to smile back because there are too many emotions going through her right now to even pick out one.

Still, she’s an idiot if she thinks that not playing nice means she leaves. Life doesn’t work like that and she’s very sure that if Enjolras wanted to kill her, he would have already. That’s about the only good thing she can find to consider right now.

“You’re not afraid of me,” Enjolras remarks, red tie bright against the starch white of his dress shirt and dark blazer. “Which is strange, because everyone else would be, knowing what you do.”

“I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’m not afraid,” she replies. It’s easy to let the anger under her skin simmer, to drown out the fear. “I am. It’s just mixed in with a whole bunch of other emotions that I don’t think can be properly named. To be fair though, maybe it’s not the man that makes people afraid. Maybe it’s everything else.”

“Certainly. But enough about me. That’s not why you’re here. You and I have a common interest. And it is extremely important to me that the interest be protected.”

“Don’t pretend like you care about him,” she bites out, sharply. “If you did, you wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of lying to him.”

“Like I said,” Enjolras repeats calmly, taking a sip of wine. “Common interest. With an anomaly that I can’t quite figure out.”

Oh of course he can’t. “I can’t imagine why. Anomalies are normally open books.” She shrugs.

“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” he demurs, amused. “You see, here’s how far I got.” He leans in. “You were a doctor who failed, turned sober companion who succeeded. I’ve seen your record. Quite an interesting one. But you stopped being his sober companion and now I don’t know what you are. Do you?”

She fights the urge to punch him in the face, knows that by probably doing so, she will die. “People are dissatisfied with their jobs all the time,” she points out, fingers curling around the silverware. She makes no move to meet him halfway, lets him look at her all he wants. She has nothing that she would want to say to him that doesn’t involve going to hell or taking the knife in her hand and digging it into his jugular to make a point. The main thing is, she’s very sure she hates this son of a bitch for what he put Grantaire through and that’s enough for her to hold everything together.

“You really are protective over him,” Enjolras mutters softly, face inches from her across the table. His eyes are searching her face for something, and something in her stomach feels cold at the thought of him finding her interesting of all people. “What does he see in you?” he whispers, almost painfully. “What does he see in you?”

“Nothing,” she replies, voice hollow. “He sees nothing.”

Lunch after that is a fairly awkward affair, consisting of him staring at her with interest across the table, and her attempting to not throw up because there is a game going on and she isn’t sure she wants to be a part in any of it.

He drops her off in front of the brownstone, and has the audacity to walk her to the door before pressing a kiss to her cheek, a pale imitation of romance or friendship before getting back in the car and driving away.

She waits a full five minutes after unlocking the front door and standing in the foyer before she pulls out her cell phone (also graciously returned to her after lunch) before dialing his number.

“It’s me,” and it amazes her that her voice is so steady even though her hands are shaking. “He’s not over there. He was just here.” And that’s all she can say as his voice rings through the phone and she can’t respond to any of his questions other than ‘I’m home’ because she’s sunken to the floor and anger has given way to terror and she’s fucking terrified for both of them.

But mainly him, because this has never been about her at all.

 

 

**xv.**

Nothing else happens for a while. There is little she can do to help Grantaire, because it seems that even he is at a loss at what to do. He lets her take him to meetings, listens when she prompts him to but it’s like a switch has been flipped in him, reducing him slowly into a mess that she isn’t sure how to handle.

So she stays with him, and hopes that knowing that she’s here will stop him from sliding back to that dark place.

She comes back home one day to see a familiar black car outside of their house and she activates some sort of panic autopilot inside of her, reaching into her pocket as she runs all the way through the door before a man in black is grabbing her by the arm, a gun hidden under his jacket and it takes Enjolras’s voice from the living room to get him to let go.

She doesn’t say a word, just tenses up as she shakes off the handprint and glances between him and Grantaire, who is pale but composed in his usual armchair, Enjolras seated comfortably on the couch. She isn’t sure she should be here for this, but she crosses the room to sit by Grantaire’s side, his foot kicking out her usual seat that she snags with her ankle to position it and herself accordingly.

“Now that you’re both here, we can finally get started.” As if this is a business discussion, but the look on Enjolras’s face isn’t giving her any comfort. “I have a proposition.”

Grantaire isn’t looking at her, but fuck Enjolras, she’ll look at him all she wants because Grantaire is her priority. So when he reaches a hand out, she takes it, because as long as he needs it, she’ll be here and god she hopes that police are listening to this conversation because he’s on speakerphone in her jacket pocket and there is a large part of her growing aware that there is a loaded gun in this room; she just isn't sure who is going to be hurt by the time this is all over.

It might be all of them. Or just one.


End file.
